I thought I'd try a formula LW piece. You know the trope - caught the bitch - burned the bitch - humping the divorcee next door. Of course, I'm aware this particular warhorse has been ridden a few million times. So, I added a slightly alien twist, just for fun. I hope you enjoy - DT.
TRINITY
Trinity sits smack dab in the middle of the Journada del Muerto. And yes, that means, "Journey of the Dead Man." You pass it via two lane blacktop that cuts directly across the White Sands Missile Range, deep in New Mexico's Sonoran desert.
It was nighttime and the road was empty. The sky was black-velvet and the stars had the clarity you get where there's absolutely no civilization. There was even the occasional meteor floating across the horizon, like a single snowflake. It was just me, my faithful F-150 and the random armadillo. All I needed was a smelly old brown-dog named Buster and It would be a sad country song.
I thought back a few days.
It's funny how a simple decision can change your life. Cross the street, or don't cross it, turn left, or right, scratch an itch, or not. We make hundreds of those choices every day and sometimes they'll kill you.
It was nothing that I could put my finger on. She just acted different. There was too much detail about work, like she was painting a picture. There was over-attention to schedules, like she was tracking me, and there was the scrupulous way she fulfilled her wifely duties. It was like she thought that fucking me MORE FREQUENTLY would make me LESS suspicious.
It's way too easy to dig up the truth in this modern age. In fact, people would cheat less if they knew how far the technology reached. So, when that little devil "suspicion" tickled my fancy I just downloaded a high-end Bluejacking tool. The only problem is that you can learn things that you just hate to find out.
*****
Brenda was a great wife, intelligent, witty, gorgeous, and a beast in the bedroom. How we met and married is irrelevant. Suffice it to say that, for fourteen years we lived a happy upper middle-class life in the Northeast Albuquerque suburbs.
We were DINKs by choice. So, we could afford the finer things, nice house, frequent travel, and expensive restaurants. Brenda is sex on a stick, tiny, dark-haired, dark-eyed, and very curvy, with pert boobs and smashing long legs. But her best asset was her supple callipygian ass, pun intended.
My wife did PR consulting for a global firm that made its fortune paving paradise. Given New Mexico's sunny climate, tract development had been a growth industry for some time. The only problem was that the people currently residing in paradise might not want it paved. So, Brenda did lots of meet-and-greets and networking with big-time money men and politicians.
Brenda's career was my version of the nineth-level-of-Dante's-Hell. I'm a nerd you see, and nerds don't get out much. I do nerd things at Sandia National Laboratories, which is why we lived in Albuquerque. It's high paid and low stress because I'm very good at what I do.
I work in counterespionage technology. It's a profession that's dedicated to lying and deceit, sort of like politics. The job entails plenty of old fashioned machismo. But it's more like Dr. Evil's than Conan's. Of course, diabolically clever will beat musclebound and stupid every time.
You might wonder how Brenda and I ended-up as beauty and the nerd. Like I said, the details of the romance are irrelevant. We connected because we are both smart, funny, and adventurous. She had dated a lot of jocks and pretty boys. I'm not bad looking and I'm reasonably well-off. Hence, I'd known my share of hot women. The problem was that everybody we'd been with prior to meeting up bored us to tears.
You're going to spend a significant chunk of time with just one individual after you marry. So, you had better marry someone who excites you. Brenda and I had completely different personalities. But we fit together like we were made for each other. That doesn't mean we walked around joined at the hip. We had our own interests and special abilities. But our complementary qualities cemented our bond.
Brenda's emotions made her an exhilarating partner. Nothing was ever dull and boring with my wife. But sometimes her feelings would get the better of her and she counted on me to talk her down off the ledge. Me? I'm a little too cerebral. Brenda got me out of my own head.
Neither of us are very big, Brenda is five two and calling me five nine would be generous. But both of us are as healthy as can be. We both loved the outdoors and Albuquerque is the ideal place for that. We hiked, biked, or kayaked daily. People thought we were the ideal couple.
I think it was my lack of stature that gave Hondo the idea that Brenda would be an easy score. Richard Tudwell was a neighbor. He was a Major in one of the training wings at Kirtland and he had the Great American Hero act down pat. He even adopted a call sign. Nobody knew where he got it since he wasn't a pilot. But he preferred to be called "Hondo."
Most of us just called him "Tud," mainly because he hated being called that.
Tud, was beefy, easily a half foot taller than me and perhaps seventy pounds heavier. A lot of that was blubber, whereas I didn't have an ounce of fat at one-seventy-five. But the contrast between sizes made it seem like I was three quarters the man he was. And he wasn't subtle about pointing it out.
Every guy has been bullied. Most either take it, or they fight. But there are a few amusing alternatives. I always had a way with words. So, my stock response in bully situations was a smart-ass remark that everybody else got, but which sailed right over the target's head.
The trick was to cut the guy in such a way that he didn't know it'd happened until he turned around and his head fell off. So, when "Hondo" would patronizingly call me "Little Davey" I would shrug, laugh self-effacingly and banter back, "Not where it counts little DICKey." Turd, I mean Tud's, look of confusion at the gales of laughter was priceless.
The Snake slithered into my Garden because the people in our neighborhood liked to party. There are many things that I'm interested in. None of those include gossip, innuendo, or outright judgement about the mundane comings-and-goings of distant acquaintances. But Brenda wallowed in it.
I could never tell whether her in-group actually enjoyed each other's company, or whether the parties were just the playing field where they could stake out turf. I DO know that there was far too much drinking and up-close-and-personal contact among the various players.
I went to those dreadful events because that's what good husband's do. Nevertheless, since I cared less about golf, or the won-loss record of the Albuquerque Isotopes, I was always consigned to the ancillary spouse group. While the insiders reveled in the pleasures of the herd.
The typical progression was jolly arrivals, followed by the machine gun rattle of small talk as they caught up on events in the six LONG days that they'd been apart. Then, once the communal wheels had been greased by liberal amounts of alcohol, the participants would settle down to the real point of the evening, which was cozy drunken conversations.
Those discussions normally entailed overly familiar touching, a bit of questionable leaning-in and melodramatic outpourings of emotion about topics that would seem trivial if both parties were in their right mind. Brenda lived for that stuff.
She told me that she was a "people person.' Well, she was undeniably that. But she also enjoyed playing mother-confessor to her nit-wit girlfriends. Vampires have to suck blood and Brenda seemed to have the same need for gossip. Still, I DID learn some very shocking things about the supposedly "happily married" denizens of the neighborhood.
It was at one of those parties that I discovered my wife in intimate conversation with "Hondo " Tudwell. That was eye-opening. Turd was hunched over looking distraught, while Brenda lovingly clutched his hand in both of hers. I would have bought the pretense except that Hondo was giving Benda's delectable cleavage considerable side-eye while he was pouring out his heart.
I loathed the guy for a number of reasons - besides the phony macho-man act. The scene in front of me just added one more count to the indictment. Turd was a relentless womanizer. He told anybody foolish enough to ask, that it was his privilege as the alpha male in the herd. We all just thought it was because he was an amoral prick.
We generally ignored him, unless it was your wife he was hitting on. Then the impulse was to remove her from his clutches, the faster the better. So, I said nonchalantly, even though I was seething inside, "Let's go Brenda, it's late." She glanced up, anger flashed across her face and said, "Can't you see we're discussing something important here Davy." Now THAT was a new and different response.
Turd could see he was busted. So, he went all noble grief. He said, "No Brenda, you've helped me a lot. You need to go home with your husband." Then he sadly patted her hand, stood, and wandered back into the seething mass of people; trailing "broken" and "defeated" behind him.
Saint Brenda was in a snit all the way home. It seems that Turd's wife, the woman he had "loved" since their graduation from Texas A&M was catting around on him and he was devastated.
They were a perfect couple. Turd was an obnoxious, narcissistic asshole and Polly was a vacuous, self-absorbed, bimbo, who had once been Miss Texas World. She was breathtaking in a boom-boom-ba-boom kind of way unless you had the excruciating experience of talking to her.
I mean - humans only have so much blood in their bodies - right? In Polly's case it was apparent that her huge tits had siphoned off the life giving fluid that should have been allocated to her brain. Still, with a face and body like hers it really didn't matter. But I digress.
Turd had waylaid Brenda in a dark corner to "seek her advice." When I stumbled on their cozy little get-together Brenda was helping Dickhead "channel his grief." I didn't buy it for a minute. But Brenda adores sappy melodrama, and she wasn't pleased that I'd broken up her little tet-a-tet.